10 Reasons Why Companies Move from Stripe Billing to Sequence

In preparation for a recent board meeting, we discovered that >50% of our revenue comes from Stripe Billing migrations.

We previously wrote about Why Stripe is Great and our admiration continues to grow, particularly in light of their Annual Letter, which pointed out that Stripe Billing is doing $500m in annual revenue run rate.

Sequence has been completing a record number of Stripe migrations in 2025, primarily for the reasons listed in our previous article, all of which can be summarized as follows: Stripe is a top class payment gateway and basic subscription management tool, but is not built for enterprise / sales-led contracts where pricing is custom.

For early stage companies, Stripe is an easy way to begin collecting revenue using simple subscriptions and invoices, making it a perfect fit for PLG models where speed to onboard is key. Their API suite has established a strong reputation amongst the developer community, who see Stripe as one of the most flexible tools to embed within the revenue stack. Yet more and more B2B teams are making the switch away from Stripe as they reach 5-10m+ in ARR.

We surveyed dozens of prospects and customers to gather the main reasons why B2B teams moved away from Stripe Billing to Sequence:

1. No support for backdated billing

"Inability to handle backdated billing schedules means that historical invoices can't be easily generated, resulting in revenue leakage as some legacy invoices from older contracts fail to be issued in a timely manner."

With Sequence, customers can create historical schedules and instantly trigger invoices for legacy contracts.

2. Cost at scale

"Cost. As revenue scales, the 0.7% Stripe invoicing fee begins to feel disproportionate for a lightweight subscription management solution."

Sequence offers a tiered fee for a predictable cost structure that incentivises revenue growth with a reduced unit rate.

3. Inflexible billing phases

"Simple but impactful UX details, like starting a billing schedule before the day it goes live or archiving erroneously created schedules make a huge difference to the user experience. Similarly, adding labels to contract phases helps to make complex deals easy to understand and manage."

Sequence billing phases (with custom naming) and flexible start / end dates allow for a highly configurable invoicing workflow for any B2B contract structure.

4. No automated seat-based proration

"For seat-based products, we could not easily manage prorated overages for seat upgrades. Since moving to Sequence we have unlocked an additional $200k in revenue per quarter by tracking prorated overages."

Sequence's seat-based pricing infrastructure allows customers to instantly charge for seat upgrades in real time — putting revenue recovery on autopilot.

5. Support and responsiveness

"Instead of navigating endless back-and-forth support tickets, we like that Sequence works directly with us during onboarding and the ongoing support team quickly fixes errors and takes in feature requests with urgency. For teams that are scaling fast, this kind of collaboration is essential."

Every Sequence customer receives a dedicated onboarding manager and Solutions Engineer, resulting in top-rated G2 reviews and customer stories.

6. Dashboard completeness

"Having to rely on developers to enact changes via API due to an incomplete dashboard experience. No finance operator wants to be held up on billing run week by a pending engineering ticket."

Sequence offers a no-code dashboard for finance operators with a Notion-style UI to enable easy pricing edits and contract amendments with zero engineering involvement.

7. No flexible ARR/MRR reporting

"No customisation with regard to ARR/MRR calculations. We have slight iterations in our reporting processes, and don't want to rely on a complex SQL query to adjust our data export from Stripe."

Sequence partners with Equals to provide a fully tailored SaaS reporting dashboard for any performance metric — ARR, MRR, NRR, churn, and more.

8. Complex pricing model management

"Enterprise involves a lot of custom pricing with different structures. This is possible to do in Stripe, but a huge pain point as we have to create a new pricing model each time without an easy way to expand our product catalogue with more complex models."

Sequence is purpose built to handle PLG and enterprise billing in tandem. Send your most complex B2B contract to revenue@sequencehq.com and see for yourself.

9. True-up billing is entirely manual

"We have a quarterly true-up model where we bill conditionally if there are additional seats for the Enterprise plans. These are all manual changes within Stripe right now and with a growing customer base this becomes a significant time commitment."

Sequence natively supports true-ups on a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual basis — increasingly common as usage-based companies deploy minimum commitments to provide revenue predictability and downside protection.

10. Disconnected quoting and billing

"Our order form process is completely detached from Stripe invoicing, so mistakes can occur if things do not match and it also creates duplicative work."

Sequence is one of the few billing providers with a native CPQ (quoting) module, allowing customers to slot Sequence in between the CRM and ERP for a truly streamlined sales-to-finance workflow.

At Sequence, we continue to see teams reach the turning point with Stripe. Even those who previously accepted Stripe’s limitations make the switch when they realize how much time, revenue, and flexibility they’re sacrificing by sticking with a billing tool that wasn’t built for their business model. As growth breeds increasing complexity in pricing, the need for a scalable, full-featured revenue collection system becomes impossible to ignore.

Sequence offers a path forward: a robust billing platform purpose built to handle complex sales-led, hybrid, and usage based pricing models that sales & finance teams actually enjoy using.

As we often say to our customers, “Use Stripe for payments, Sequence for billing”. Our native Stripe payments integration and managed migration service has made this a no-brainer for our customers, and we expect this trend to accelerate in the coming months.

Frequently asked questions

Is Stripe Billing suitable for enterprise billing? Stripe Billing is well suited for simple subscription models and PLG products. It becomes limiting for enterprise and sales-led deals — particularly around custom contract structures, true-up billing, backdated schedules, and seat-based prorations. Most teams hit this ceiling between $5m and $15m ARR.

How long does it take to migrate from Stripe Billing to Sequence? Most Sequence customers complete the migration in four to eight weeks. Sequence provides a dedicated onboarding manager and Solutions Engineer for every migration, and the native Stripe payments integration means you keep using Stripe for payment processing — only the billing layer changes.

What does Stripe Billing cost compared to Sequence? Stripe charges 0.7% on invoiced revenue (on top of payment processing fees). At $5m ARR that's $35,000 per year for billing software alone. Sequence uses a tiered pricing model that becomes more cost-effective as revenue grows. Contact us for a direct comparison based on your volume.

Can Sequence handle usage-based pricing and minimum commitments? Yes. Sequence natively supports usage-based billing, seat-based pricing, true-ups (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual), and minimum commitment structures. These can be combined in a single contract — something that requires heavy custom engineering in Stripe.

Thanks to the teams at Incident.io, Workshop, and Arcade and several other Sequence customers for their input on this post.